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During the year 1956, John Morris was a teenager when he first went to Christmas Island in the Pacific. However, he had no idea that these experiences would affect his life forever after. Morris is one of the last surviving 22,000 people who witnessed the UK’s nuclear bomb tests, and those who are still able are fighting to discover what it did to their bodies. The UK military is suspected of exposing the personnel to radiation that would harm them and their descendants, according to the dwindling group of men.
This Wednesday, the BBC will air a film detailing their struggle for what they believe is a hidden truth. Thousands of these men have suffered from diseases and other conditions that other nuclear states, including the US, have recognized as likely being linked to testing that is now banned. In Mr. Morris’s case, he believes that the death of his first child, Steven, in 1962, was the result of the radiation damage he received during Operation Grapple, the designation given to a series of British nuclear weapons experiments.
Steven Morris died when he was only four months old while lying in his cot. The coroner suspected that the baby’s lung had not developed properly, and no one knows why. Morris believes that the Ministry of Defence and the tests they conducted on him for Steven’s death were to blame. Morris’s story is one of many in the film, which also discusses what happened to Indigenous communities who lived in areas where nuclear weapon tests took place in Australia. They believe they were used as guinea pigs, subject to live human experimentation as the UK raced to join the USA and Russia as a nuclear power.
The campaign for disclosure and damages began decades ago as veterans linked health concerns, cancers, and birth defects in children to nuclear testing, which began in 1952, but in 2012, the Supreme Court stopped the fight for damages, saying that the men could not demonstrate the link. However, the campaign was relaunched last year because of potentially vital new evidence discovered in what is known as the “Gledhill memo.” According to the 1958 report from Christmas Island to the nuclear program’s top-secret UK headquarters, Squadron Leader Terry Gledhill’s blood tests showed “gross irregularity.”
The campaign claims that the memo is proof that personnel submitted to blood tests, and there was a continuous but classified strategy to observe them. Since then, the circumstantial proof has expanded. After a long Freedom of Information fight, 4,000 pages of papers from the Atomic Weapons Establishment were declassified earlier this year. These documents are still being studied, but the campaign contends that they show there were standing orders for repeated blood and urine tests of military personnel and Indigenous communities at the test sites. The language in some of the documents is very explicit; one from 1957 states, “all personnel selected for duty at Maralinga [the Australian test site] may be exposed to radiation.
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